Add a Facebook Like Button and Box to Your Website

Facebook has recently launched the Like button and Like box. For those of who are not familiar with Facebook you might have run into a ‘Become a Fan’ button when visiting websites. That has been replaced with the Like box and Facebook has added another twist to it… besides liking Facebook Fan Pages your visitors can like specific blog articles, video, images; and when they like them they will be shared with their friends. Stay tuned as we show you an example along with a quick tutorial on creating a like button and box for your website.

The Become a Fan button is now the Like box.

Let’s take a look at the Like button…

The Facebook Like button is fairly simple. It includes a little thumbs up icon along with a short phrase ‘Be the first of your friends to like this’. Facebook allows for some minor customization such as width, height, different fonts, and few other tweaks. Truly, there isn’t much to it. Then again, it’s not meant to overshadow your website. It’s meant to share your content with the Facebook community (400+ million users).

When you put a Like Button on your website, people can click it and it will appear on their Facebook Wall.

Personalize visitor’s experience…

A fun and appealing feature from the Like button is that you can see which friends have already liked the article. In the following example you can see that Rick and Brian are friends (actually they are brothers). Facebook’s new social plugins allow websites, such as yours, to become more social. Basically, it means that some of the features on Facebook can now be incorporated into your site.

The Like button appearing on wisnet.com’s blog.

Create your own Like buttons…

Searching through the developer section on Facebook you will run into the Like Button page. Here you can create Like buttons for your site. It’s pretty straightforward. First enter the url or web address of the webpage that you want others to like. Choose from a few design elements and grab the code. Voila, you have a Like button! From there you can paste the code into a blog article (in the HTML source). Although you can do this yourself, I recommend having your developers program it into the site. Creating a like button for every page, or blog article, could be tedious.

Create your own Like buttons directly on Facebook.

How to get a Like Box for your Facebook Fan Page

Creating a Like box for your Fan Page is a little different than a Like button. In order to boost your Fan Page prevalence you need to keep increasing your fan base.

‘Getting people to click the ‘like’ box for your site can help generate positive word-of-mouth and spread your name more quickly among their friends. It is a wonderful way to get free advertising, simple to use and only takes one click!’ – Jody | wisnet.com Team Member

From here you can style the Like Box. When finished click Get Code and copy and paste the code to your website in the html source code. (Note: It’s recommended to have your developer install it within your site.) Besides adding it to the homepage of your website it might be beneficial to have it on every page since not all visitors go directly to the homepage. One great place to put it is at the footer. Read the article Stylish and Informative Footer Designs for some visual examples.

Conclusion

Social marketing is using services such a Facebook and Twitter to market your company. Viral marketing is using these networks to create spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm about a blog article, a brand, your company, a video and so on. Using the Facebook Like button and box makes it easy for Facebook user’s to spread the word. Enjoy!